Over the last several decades there has been a constant increase in the importance of the distribution of software resources, whether they be large works such as programs, documents, videos, interactive virtual realities, and games, or smaller resources such as fonts, images, or sounds, which are used in conjunction with, or as part of, such larger works. As an increasing number of people make their living creating and distributing software, it becomes increasingly important for such people to prevent unauthorized use of their products and services. This is particularly true since it is often extremely easy to copy software resources.
Among important types of software resources are page imaging resources, such as graphics, images, and fonts, which are used in rendering the images of documents, such as printed pages, World Wide Web pages, or interactive video screen images. Since an individual page imaging resource is often intended to be used in multiple different places by multiple different documents, it often makes sense to store and distribute them as separate files. For example, on the prior art World Wide Web, image resources used by Web pages are stored and distributed as separate files, each of which has a separate addresses on the Internet defined by a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. A Web page contains a reference to each such resource it uses. Each such reference identifies its associated resource's URL within a non-displayed tag field contained in the text of its Web page.
A somewhat similar system has been created by the assignee of the present application, Bitstream Inc., which uses tag fields in Web pages to identify the URLs of portable font resources ("PFRs"). PFRs are page imaging resources which define the shape of fonts to be used in rendering a Web Page. By sending a PFR with a page, the page can be rendered with the exact same fonts as was intended by the page's author, whether or not the computer viewing the given page has those fonts installed in its operating system. After a Web page has been accessed from over the Internet, PFRs identified in the page's PFR tag fields can be requested from the network and, once received, can be used by a Web browser to render the text of the page with the intended fonts. This system enables a Web site author to copy into one or more PFRs the shapes of any characters in any fonts which occur in his Web site, as those shapes are defined by an original font description installed in the font manager of the operating system of his computer. A URL pointing to a PFR is placed in a tag field in any Web page which uses the PFR's character-font shapes. This system is described in much greater detail in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/527,518 (hereinafter "The 1995 TrueDoc Application"), entitled "Apparatus and Methods For Creating And Using Portable Fonts", filed by John S. Collins et al. on Sep. 12, 1995, which application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
The system described in the 1995 TrueDoc Application uses the assignee's TrueDoc.TM. technology. This technology enables the character-font descriptions placed in a PFR to copy the shape, but not other aspects of the original font descriptions in a Web site author's computer from which the PFR's font descriptions are derived. This is valuable because the law has held that shapes of fonts are not copyrightable, and, thus, this enables PFRs to be legally used by remote computers for the purpose of displaying Web pages with their intended fonts without the need for copyright licenses or negotiations. But the assignee of the present invention is itself in the business of designing fonts, and wishes to strike a reasonable balance between the need to make it easy for fonts be used and viewed in electronically distributed documents, and the need to enable those who design fonts to obtain a sufficient financial reward for doing, so as to encourage the creation and telling of new fonts.
From the standpoint of those in the business of selling fonts, allowing documents created with licensed fonts to be viewed on computers for which those fonts have not been licensed is actually beneficial, because it increases the benefits of using--and, thus, the market for--a larger number of fonts. But to those who sell fonts allowing people to create and have other computers view documents without ever having licensed fonts is not beneficial. Unfortunately, it would be possible for people to create PFRs containing complete character sets of many fonts and then make them freely available on the Internet. These PFRs could then be used in the Web pages of others who have never licensed such fonts, merely by placing a PFR tag field pointing to such PFRs in their Web pages. If it became common knowledge that this could be done, PFRs distributed over the Web could have a negative impact on the market for properly licensed fonts.
Although the above discussion has been made with reference to portable font resources, the same issues apply to many other forms of software resources. This includes other types of page imaging resources, such as graphics and images. It also could apply to sound resources or software resources, such as, for example, Java applets.
The issue of undesired use of distributed software resources also applies to resources distributed by means other than the Internet, including the distribution of resources via interactive TV or physical recording media, such as floppy disks or CD-ROM.